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Why we call parents ‘parents’

Why do we call our parents Mum, Dad and other similar
words? Researchers tend to say that those words come from the sounds babies
make, but this isn’t a very satisfactory answer. Probably all societies call parents
by names and nicknames that mean they
are parents. This is very strange when you think about it. Whenever someone is
special we give them a proper name. Parents are very special but we give them
common names.

This practice does not seem to change with adulthood or cultural progress. In modern society, a father will typically get upset if you, as his child, called him by his personal name. On the other hand, you will get upset if he did not call your dog Charlie but any other word indicating a dog. ‘I am your father’, he will argue, and draw on his biological knowledge. Whereas you will give a number of cultural reasons why your dog is special.

Traditionally, the relationship between language and reality
is viewed from two fundamental perspectives.[i]
One sees the mind as a sort of computer that would allow the child to identify her
real parents. The other perspective sees it as a sociocultural entity, so that such
a reality could not be something the child logically discovers, but something
that is created in interaction with others.

This theoretical dichotomy is probably as unhelpful as arguing with your parents over who is special and why. It means that science does not understand words that are central to our sense of reality. Indeed, it is true that parenthood has a biological basis, but it is also true that parenting is a markedly cultural activity. Should we not elucidate this question before attempting to solve any other big mysteries? This has been in my mind ever since I became a parent myself.

A question of meanings

We know that all languages have words and their respective
meanings. Yet there are clearly two types of meanings: natural and social. All
societies must have words for the earth, the sky and the rain because all human
beings encounter and name these things. These are what I call natural meanings.
On the other hand, there are words that depend on each cultural context, that
is, words that refer to things only certain people do. For example, a
shaman uses a dhami/jhankri altar only in Nepal, whereas in
England they have doctors who work in hospitals. These are social
meanings. Essentially, we arrive at natural meanings when we describe reality,
whereas we create social meanings in order to prescribe behaviour.

Now, what is interesting about Mum, Dad or any
other kinship term is that these words combine a natural and a social meaning. This
is because, of course, all human beings naturally encounter parents and kin, while
at the same time being a parent or kin involves doing different things in
different societies. In many societies, mothers are not supposed to encourage
their daughters to have sex before marriage, but in some societies they are.
Often a child is supposed to marry their cousin, or believed to have several
mothers and fathers.[ii] These different roles are all
mediated by language.

We humans can use language to prescribe all sorts of roles
and group membership, so that addressing someone as Father in Nepal has
something in common with addressing someone as Doctor in an English hospital.
We do this to invoke a social behaviour and context—being a father in Nepal or
a doctor in a hospital—that we do not naturally expect. One might argue that
chimpanzee calls are also meant to produce such a change of behaviour in
others. However, chimps do not tend to give each other roles.

Imagine a speaking chimp calling his mother Mum. This
makes little sense, because a female chimp will behave as a mother regardless
of what she is being called; and no matter which group of chimps a female
belongs to, this biological function remains the same. Language can also
transmit these natural meanings—what may be called knowledge—in the same way as we describe the earth, the sky and the
rain. Thus, in a society, the word mother reflects the universal knowledge
that a child has come from a certain woman who has a caring instinct, but it
also reflects a certain way of taking care of children. This makes the word
very confusing, as it effectively indicates what is ‘naturally’ expected of
mothers in different societies.

What is going on here? There is another important feature of
language that conflates natural and social meanings. It is myth. Consider the
Greek goddess Gaia, ‘Mother Earth’, who gave birth to all life and the gods by
having sex with her son Uranus, ‘Father Sky’.[iii]
Those gods engaged in all manner of personal drama but also caused thunder and
the seasons. The Christian God, too, created the world with his word, yet this
was a kind of test to see if we would engage in moral relationships. Societies
have always tried to explain the world not so much for the sake of knowledge,
but to persuade their future generations to obey their norms as if they were
immutable, natural laws. This is an unconscious process, in which we deceive ourselves
that the myth is real while we know at some level that we are wearing masks.

Small children cannot understand what we mean by Mother
Earth, the Nation or God the Father, but they can understand the parental language
that forms the basis of those myths. They grow up hearing stories about
anthropomorphic animals who have kinship roles, such as Mama Bear or the Big
Bad Wolf. These narratives have an important cognitive and emotional function. However,
eventually we learn that the behaviour of spouses, parents and children is part
of the workings of the universe and should be seriously expected, as one
expects rain. Our lives then necessitate ‘meaning’ in an absolute, prescriptive
sense that disguises as a description of reality: ‘What
is the meaning of life?’

The proposition

It is my impression that we receive most of our earliest and most lasting instructions in the form of attributions. One is, say, told one is a good or a bad boy or girl, not only instructed tobe a good or bad boy or girl.’

—R. D. Laing (1971, p. 78)

We call parents—and
ourselves as parents—‘parents’ because we are telling
them what they ‘are’. That is, we are telling these people what they must do, echoing
how their own parents spoke to them when they were small. This is how our
species maintains the moral essence of myth, unconsciously. (It is useful to
distinguish morality, as a linguistic device, from ethics or ethical emotions.)
Myth is the linguistic way in which our competing tribes have been organised
since time immemorial, and though we have progressed in letting go of it, we
are still under its cognitive grip.[iv]
Our knowledge of biological relatedness supports the system of kinship that
defines each society, but parenthood is mainly a declaration. A parent is
anyone who is considered responsible for our sexual relations, whom we will
marry and how we will conduct moral aspects of our life.

None of this controlling activity is exactly natural—if we
understand nature as opposed to culture—but it can lead to a strong
predisposition. The father who feels offended because you have used his
personal name reacts as though you had broken a law of nature. You ought to
call him a father because of the way things are in reality, such as that he
conceived you and loves you. Ironically, where your father is valued for being
a father, your dog is devalued for being a dog. He ought to call your dog Charlie
because your relationship with this animal is also a loving reality, as
valid as the ‘biological’ reality your father invokes. However, both arguments
are just a cultural game that has little to do with the science of biology.

This kind of ambivalent, pseudo-natural attachment is the
foundation of every society. It is probably why we have such long childhoods
compared to other animals, and certainly why our bond with parents and
grandparents lasts for a lifetime—a feature we only share with a handful of
other species, and even then only in the case of grandmas.[v]
What is more, these bonds can transcend a lifetime, as they are bonds between
characters more than between persons. In a way, we are eternal children who are
being watched by parents and gods of all kinds, and who are also watchers
insofar as children too have an interest in these idealistic relationships.

Baby talk

The psychology of myth can be reduced to the way we were
spoken to when we were small. Developmental linguists call this peculiarity
child-directed speech or baby talk. Consider a nanny who says to the child, ‘Mummy
has to go to work’, as the mother leaves and they wave goodbye. In her speech,
the nanny does not specify whose mother she means(that is, she’s not
saying your mummy has to go to work),
but through this ambiguity she makes an abstract idea feel paradoxically close.
Similarly, when we say, ‘Dad left you out of the will’ or ‘God, why have you forsaken
me!’, it is as if we inhabited a common mind that makes these characters always
present.

This effect was illustrated by a children’s mental health
specialist, who was contacted as part of Live Science’s enquiry into this ordinary
mystery.[vi]
The specialist said that the pronouns I and
you are too abstract, and that the
point of baby talk is to ‘indicate the relationship, “mommy and me”’. Yet it is
the other way around. The pronouns I and
you primarily indicate a physical
distinction between two different minds; whereas mommy indicates someone who could possibly be your nanny’s mother,
someone you don’t even know. The mommy will use the third person to refer to
herself also in a situated context, ‘Mommy has to go to work’, which makes this
form of speech rather abstract and self-deceptive.

This specialist’s answer is common and surely related to the conflicting emotions that underlie such an aspect of language. It illustrates that even those who study the mind can prefer traditional answers to scientific ones.[vii] The advancement of science, however, has always consisted in overcoming these kinds of taboos and existential assumptions. This brings us closer to psychoanalysts and their more personal research of children and families. The ’60s philosopher and ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R.D. Laing, in particular, paid more attention to the way language shaped these most important relationships. His was a time when psychiatrists considered homosexuality a mental illness, just as calling someone a homosexual was considered an insult, someone could not be a respectful spouse and parent.

Today homosexuality is no longer a diagnosable ‘disorder’, though it could be argued that psychiatry and its ‘biomedical’ model still consists in the unconscious elaboration of a moralising language. The number of mental diagnoses has gone from 106 in 1952 to the current 297. The same is the case with the multiple ways in which people experience gender or sexual orientation these days, or the number of social and individual identities that have populated the internet. Society resembles an ever-complex myth, whose characters spiral around the ‘biology’ or the ‘reality’ of calling someone a parent or a child.

The challenge for science

Today many people continue to suffer, essentially, because of
words that have to do directly or indirectly with reproduction. I have never
heard of anyone who dislikes being called a parent, though the new generations don’t
seem to have such a good relationship with parenting as a whole.[viii]
I personally am Jose for my own children, even though I have trouble
calling my parents anything but Mum and Dad. I seek a more realistic view of these
moral issues and how they relate to our existential troubles.[ix]
This seems to require a good understanding of language.

We have a good understanding of life because we have looked
at living things and found common characteristics, such as reproduction. Any
pattern that repeats tends to arouse our curiosity. Why do babies cry? Why does
water fall from the sky? There has clearly been an exception, though, in the
case of language. We haven’t noticed this rather strange, universal moral of
calling our parents ‘parents’. As I mentioned at the beginning, there is an old
debate in linguistics that pits those who believe that language is a kind of
mental computation against those who believe it is a cultural tool.[x]
They cannot agree on whether the grammars of our different languages are very much
alike or are instead very different—and they
take it personally. Why have biologists been relatively able to agree on a
definition of life, yet linguists have not agreed on a definition of language?

As I have explained, the problem is not with grammar but
with meaning.[xi] The
first kind of linguist believes in natural meanings only, whereas the second
believes in social meanings only. Biologists don’t have this problem insofar as they seek knowledge about
non-human beings and the morality of language—how we are supposed to conceptualise
people—does not interfere in their thinking. Chemists, physicists and engineers
are also, of course, unaffected. However, in the study of human behaviour, there
are plenty of social meanings that we mistake for natural meanings in the way I
have illustrated. Take for example, money, a symbol of tyranny and patriarchy
for many. What is money? Is it whatever people believe is money, or is there an
objective definition of it?[xii]
Likewise, what is society? What is God? Why do we use these words as though
there were no other moneys, societies or gods, just as we use the words Mother
and Father?

When faced with the question of why we use words in this way,
scientists perhaps feel uncomfortable. It seems easier to favour each view of human
behaviour, social or ‘natural’, in competition, much in the way the left and
the right do in a context of politics. However, as living organisms, we must
have an insight into our own nature. All science depends on language, language
depends on kinship, and kinship is built on our first and most important
relationships. I believe we can overcome the challenges we now face by becoming
more curious about our daily lives.

[i] These
perspectives go back to the way Aristotle disagreed with Plato on the problem of universals or the properties of
things. The first believed these were always instantiated in the material
world, whereas the second thought they existed separately as ideal forms. It
wasn’t until the 20th Century that philosophers realised this
metaphysical disagreement was all about language, with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig
Wittgenstein taking the respective positions of seeing ‘meanings’ as some kind
of atoms versus seeing them as the result of human activity. However, as I have explained, this problem can be reduced to the
very ‘unphilosophical’ question of whether the nouns Mummy and Daddy are
common or proper, because being a parent is a primary property for any human mind
or society.

[ii] The
Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea are a famous example of a matriarchal society
that discourages virginity. The same is true of American
Indian tribes. Having several mothers and/or fathers is a feature of
many societies that is relevant to the study of kinship
terminology. In the case of several fathers, there can also be partible
paternity. We should remind ourselves that these are not mere
labels, but words that register the same kind of beliefs and emotions we hold
about our parents in Western societies.

[iv]
Language and kinship are two inventions that probably co-evolved (Barnard,
2008; Allen, Callan, Dunbar, & James, 2011). Eventually, language
(and kinship) reached a complexity that cannot be explained if we think of it
as a mere means of communication. It is its function as a vehicle for
narratives and myths that explains how some of the oldest known populations of
hunter-gatherers, such as the Naro, can have 26 words for ‘talking’ and spend
their days telling intricate stories filled with rhetoric, deceit, and of
course relatives (Barnard, 2010; 2013).

[vii]
Developmental linguists themselves still put Mummy and Daddy in the
same category of study as Alice and Bill or the names of objects
or food (see e.g., Lidz, Snyder, & Pater, 2016; Saxton, 2017).